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BioFields

BioFields is a 100% Mexican industrial group created in 2007 in order to enter into businesses related to the generation of clean energy, production of high-value fuel oils and in biofuels production processes, closely linked to the conservation of the environment, using state-of-the-art and nature-friendly technology.

Open source and superior support services led move to xTuple from SAP, says Biofields

"My name is Gerardo Lopez; I'm the CIO at BioFields. BioFields is a hub of renewable energy projects. We are currently working on three of them.

Interviewer [Cam Hagan]: What prompted you to search for an ERP solution?

Now that we do manufacturing and now that we have inventory, we have sales and invoicing and all the other components of what a company's built of, the urgency for ERP came really quickly. So we need ERP for better accounting, better instruction, better control, of everything.

When the company was born in 2007, one of the main projects was an ERP implementation, so we went with SAP, and we got this solution that's called a 'baseline,' which is like the most basic version of SAP, at that moment.

The implementation process was really painful; we didn't like it all. It was complicated, and we had to make a decision if we wanted to reactivate SAP, or if we wanted to explore a new option. So the management decision was to explore a new option that made more sense in terms of cost, in terms of usability, implementation and robustness, so that's what brought us here.

Several things attracted us to xTuple, from one of the most important things is the open source. Scenario: we love the idea of being able to build on top of it ourselves. I have a development background, so in the IT area of the company we are really development-oriented. So we would like to explore that part, we like that a lot. Also the licensing scenarios, we find them also very interesting. We think they make a lot of sense; specifically now with the new product you have in the cloud, which, for us at this moment, will save us a lot of pain, and will help us get up real quickly; and probably after that we'll move on to our own local thing, but that's the thing that attracted us; and, of course, the robustness of the system itself.

And also, a very important thing is that, we love the fact that we can be in direct touch with you guys, as the creators of the system, we can have our questions answered, we can get services directly from you, of course also from the partners, but having that support there is very important for us, that is something we did not have with SAP."